Ventura

(App, USA)

The champion of the brief fashion of desktop publishing, which was all the rage 1989-1995 or so. The Ventura was the workhorse in that stable, because it used GEM from Digital Research, which was better windows than any windowses of the time, being generally a few years ahead of it (and in some features, ten years - like dragging a document's icon to the printer icon to print it, which it had from the start, while Redmond "invented" it in 1995). It could even work on a 286, albeit that was a kind of a torture, but still feasible.

My first run with it was in 1989, when we at DBA published a tourist guide of the city; then in 1991 when we ran about seven issues of a local weekly newspaper (by brother-in-law of Pop, until he ran out of cash), plus a few oddball issues here and there, and eventually the book of some old cardiologist, who just wanted to leave a monument to himself (published by DBA, which left us with stacks of books to sell - which nobody even wanted as a gift).

The last thing related with it was in january of 1995, in Gemenc, when the local newspaper had trouble with memory management on their 486es, even though they boasted 8 or even 16MB, but the drivers weren't correctly configured. I had to go there, actually Mihály took me, to run QEMM's* auto-config somewhere between six and ten reboots until it started running swimmingly. Was the hero of the day then. They needed all that memory just to comfortably run the Ventura, to publish the local newspaper.

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*kewemem, the unsurfuckable memory manager, which was a driver to access the memory above 1M, which was supposedly supplied with the DOS but never worked right and was slow when it did, so third party shops made their own and kewemem was the champion among them. It did require patience, because it would test one configuration, reboot, measure the results, try the next one, reboot, measure... but in the end it would find all the memory that m$ pronounced inaccessible. The m$ always operated so, they'd produce a half-baked feature, then wait for third party vendors to come with better versions or downright patches for that, then pick the winner and buy - the app, the programmers, the company (not necessarily all of that), and then sells it as his own, boasting of it as a of a new feature of their system.


Mentions: 04-X-1989., 12-X-1989., 29-XII-1989., 06-X-1990., Wienerschule, 02-IV-1991., 14-IV-1991., 29-VI-1991., 03-VI-1992., 08-V-1994., 09-I-1995., DBA, dijeta, Gemenc, Majkrosoft (m$), Marko Popović (Pop), Mihály Weisz, in serbian